Al-Qaeda is certainly not dead and will continue its nefarious pursuits

Benazir Bhutto had said a few years back that Osama lived in Musharraf’s backyard. She wasn’t lying. Post the US Special Forces raid, when a local from Abbotabad says Osama and his caboodle were living in a mansion for the last 10 years, it indicates Musharaff’s complicity. Now that he expresses glee over Osama’s killing, Al-Qaeda should actually target him. Funding for 9/11 was traced back to Pakistan. Should we doubt Pakistani Military/ISI complicity in at least planning 9/11, considering the military precision of the execution part? Ajmal Qasab has already admitted that Pakistani terrorists responsible for the 26/11 mayhem were trained by the Pakistani Marines. Confrontation between the US and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had to eventually come. Good that it has begun with the killing of Osama because ISI has become an uncontrollable monster, spawning global terror including in India and Afghanistan, and choking North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) supply line. The raid by the US Special Forces had to be flawless considering the Iranian hostage rescue fiasco of 1980 and the repercussions that a failed raid would have had deep inside Pakistan today, and especially after the recent Raymond Davis episode. Despite the façade of Pakistan being frontline partner of the US in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), the US must have been forced to take action, considering Pakistan’s role in choking NATO supplies, continuing covert assistance to Taliban, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) filling Al-Qaeda voids courtesy ISI, expanding Chinese presence in Pakistan and latter advising Afghanistan to chuck latch onto the Chinese bandwagon. Pakistan has pushed the erstwhile Afghan refugee camps into areas of Taliban strongholds. The Pir Ali Camp today is a major Taliban terrorist training facility used as a launch pad to hit NATO supply lines. To top this, there have been reports of Chinese military advisors advising Taliban how to battle NATO forces. Osama’s safe haven was adjacent to the military cantonment of Abottabad, with a host of serving and retired military officers in close proximity—the likes of Hamid Gul perhaps periodically even dining and wining with him. Notwithstanding the announcements of the US withdrawal, considering the strategic importance of the area and the fact that such withdrawal will imply Afghan National Army fighting not only the Taliban but also the Pakistani Army in the garb of Taliban—a situation culminating in Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, it can be expected that US will continue its presence for the next few decades albeit at reduced scales. How long could it tolerate the double game of Pakistan, especially with the latter bending back towards China? The US had already given the ISI too much of rope and more the delay in confronting them and Pakistan leaning more and more towards China, the situation would have had been uglier for the US, especially with China already having established strategic footprints in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The ISI has become a state within a state and international pressure must come to bring it under Parliamentary oversight with appropriate legal structures. Exposure of ISI complicity in harbouring Osama should actually be cashed upon to clip the wings of ISI. What happens now? The sheepish and blatant denials of Pakistani authorities fool no one. Al-Qaeda is certainly not dead and will continue its nefarious pursuits. In addition to Taliban, the US should bring terrorist organisations like LeT, Jammat-ud-Dawa (JuD), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) within active ambit of GWOT. The Indian polity and bureaucracy need to shake out of a defensive mind set. Currently, India is at a major disadvantage without an appropriate irregular deterrence. We need to develop both publicised overt and deniable capabilities in order to create necessary deterrence and our Special Forces must be used proactively to achieve this.